“This bill intends to address this loophole by adding a Part D to Florida Statutes 847.001 to exclude books that have adult literary value that are in violation of educational law (Florida Statutes 1006.28) and not applicable in an educational setting for children.”

The Miller Test, established with the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California, is a three-part test to determine whether a work of art, book, film, magazine is obscene. The work in question must meet all three criteria.

1. Would the average person using contemporary community standards, find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest?
2. Does the work describe sexual conduct in an offensive way as described by state law?
3. Does the work, as a whole, lack artistic, literary, political or scientific value?

Calling HB 1539 “blatantly unconstitutional,” Katie Blankenship, director of PEN America’s Florida office in Coral Gables, said that the idea that the Miller Test wouldn’t apply to books in school libraries or classrooms “flies in the face of what the Miller Test is.”

“The Miller Test basically protects us from this sort of government censorship being able to claim that something is ‘harmful to minors’ or of no value by requiring that we look at literary, scientific, cultural and educational value,” she said in a phone interview. “So doing away with this flies in the face of our constitutional rights. It flies in the face of the First Amendment.”

According to HB 1539, school districts that don’t remove objectionable material would lose their “state funds, discretionary grant funds, discretionary lottery funds or any other funds specified by the Legislature …”

"The point is just to institutionalize government censorship. It is really as simple and dystopic as that," Blankenship said.

Deborah Caldwell Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation, told VoxPopuli that HB 1539 is an attempt to “override the mandated definition of what is considered harmful to minors and stat[e] that somehow there’s an exception to … the Supreme Court’s rule because it happens to be in a school.”

She noted that under this bill, required reading for an AP literature course could be banned because of a single paragraph, “even if it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning work … that unquestionably has literary and educational value.”

“Students do have First Amendment rights and have the right to freely access materials in school libraries,” she said.

“T his is a terrible bill,” Stephanie Vanos, who represents District 6 on the Orange County School Board, told VoxPopuli. The school board will be responsible for weeding out objectionable material if HB 1539 passes.

“What we’re teaching our children is to make sure they’re reading everything fully, and this new test is basically saying it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the work says. If there’s some part that we object to, then it doesn’t matter. It’s exactly what we tell our students not to do.”

Vanos worries that legislation like this would leave Florida students ill-prepared when it comes to applying to top-tier colleges.

“They need to be competitive with students in other states who are reading a full array of books and are able to study a full array of literature,” she said. “Our students are going to be competing against those students to get into highly selective schools.”

Bankson did not respond to VoxPopuli’s email request for comment. Neither did the bill's co-sponsors, Black, Chamberlin and Jacques.

The 2023-2024 school year was a record year for book bans — more than 10,000 bans in 29 states, according to PEN America’s 2024 report Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves. That's a 300 percent increase since 2021 when the most recent wave of bans began.

No state instituted more bans — 4,200 — than Florida. And Orange County was second only to Escambia County in the number of books — 673 — pulled from classrooms and school library shelves. (Escambia banned nearly 1,600, including dictionaries and encyclopedias.)  

Interestingly, when PEN America researchers dug deeper into the 2023-2024 school year data for its Cover to Cover report, published last month, they found that of the 4,218 unique titles banned, just 13 percent contained explicit descriptions of sexual conduct “on the page.” But 36 percent involved people and characters of color while 25 percent involved LGBTQ+ characters. Among the LGBTQ+ titles, 28 percent featured trans characters.  

“They use [bans] as a weapon to go after the books or the viewpoints and characters they don’t like,” Blankenship said.

Caldwell Stone said HB 1539 would "decimate" schools' library collections.

"It empowers one person to override the wishes of other parents who might want their students to have access to different, challenging works of literature in preparation for college or have access to accurate information about human biology, reproductive health and topics like gender identity and sexual orientation," she said. "It's really telling communities that they can't make their own decisions about what their students learn, and it's telling parents that they simply don't have the ability to control what their students learn either."

Blankenship said HB 1539 is an “evolution” in conservative tactics.

“They started with Stop WOKE and Don’t Say Gay. Then they came with [Senate Bill] 266, killing all discussions and groups supporting any sort of diversity. HB 1069 created a statutory process for banning books while attacking identity. They’re now going for any sexual conduct and content."

Blankenship said these bans, which prompted PEN America to open its Florida office in 2023, are about more than just books. They muzzle speech, scare teachers and librarians into self-censorship and erase representation of people of color and LGBTQ+ communities, their experiences, history and stories.

“ What people should understand at this point is the book bans in Florida are the perfect lesson of why we should care about our local elections,” she said, adding that Florida legislation often becomes the “blueprint” for legislation that gets replicated in other states. Variations on Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education law aka Don’t Say Gay have been introduced in more than 20 states, according to PEN America.

“This is where the real fight is for our democracy,” Blankenship said.